


it's boring how people talk

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe: 1970’s, Coach/Player Relationship, Disgraced Tennis Pro Ben, F/M, First Time, Long Lost Trustfund Baby Rey, Rey Palpatine but We're Going Somewhere With It, Short Shorts, Smut, Strip Tennis, Summer Romance, Tennis AU Written by Someone Who Knows Zero About Tennis, Tennis Instructor Ben, Virgin Rey, age gap, country club, hair porn, so much thirst, summer before college, thirst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:40:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22701109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: Tennis Instructor/Student AU. Rey has recently been brought to live with her estranged grandfather. To keep her out of trouble for the summer before she goes to college, he employs disgraced Tennis Pro Neighbor Ben Solo to give her lessons. This plan does not work.He’s a very bad sport for someone who is winning. She’s one point down and he’s pacing the court like a noble lawyer in a courtroom drama. He can somehow pull it off, even in the headband and short shorts. He’d stare at the ground in the July heat as if he was Atticus Finch trying to pluck up the moral standing to make sense of this miscarriage of justice.A miscarriage of justice being that he is cursed to win against some old family rival’s teenage granddaughter in a private court every morning to well into the afternoon for the rest of the summer.Sheev clearly wanted her out of trouble by keeping her busy, as misguided as this arrangement seems in its utterly failure to keep trouble far from her mind.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 128
Kudos: 447





	1. Chapter 1

Rey is imagining a sun-speckled, bright orange pillowcase. 

One with a crest in the center of two swells as the perfect place to rest her cheek and snuggle against. One that is not particularly soft, actually hopefully quite hard, but nevertheless radioactive orange. 

It has to be. Solid and firm. Blissfully warm. She’d never get out of bed--

_Whop_

She lets out a surprised yip when a tennis ball wallops the concrete inches away from her feet with one whip of his racket in a flash of orange cotton. It ricochets into the fence behind her, rattling pathetically from the force of the swing through each link.

It disrupts every fibre of perfectly balanced landscaping in _the lawn,_ on _the grounds,_ at _the courts_ of her Grandfather’s house. Terrible, wonderful noise. Sometimes herons would light on the water at dawn and cause the most delicious racket, and that would have the old man up like a shot and swearing vengeance on them, fetching an old hunting rifle to try and remove them from disrupting the aesthetic of this ridiculous property. 

Rey feels just as out of place as those birds, and is jealous of their call out into the summer air, because she just winces inwards whenever she makes too big a ruckus for this house she lives in as a stranger. There’s a terrible impulse that frightens her most of her days: one to pad silently through the dreary hallway of the Palpatine home and throw back her head and howl until the eerie tranquility shattered around them.

It was the same dead silence that led to the start of these lessons:

“I was thinking of bringing on a Tennis Instructor for you, for the summer. An old family friend is a bit of a celebrity at the sport.”

Rey had not liked to be assigned a hobby, but she kept that to herself as she speared a fork through her fish. She had anticipated it to be more of a conversation starter with the old man, who had seemed eager to bring her into his home when her parentage was revealed, but didn’t seem to know what to do with a teenage girl when he had one. A granddaughter. He’d get her tennis lessons, and they’d talk about it and she’d try her best out of politeness and obligation, and she would be terrible at the sport regardless and drop the lessons after a few weeks.

It’s been more than a few weeks: and now at the dinner table he asks her about lessons and she says “fine” and the silence prevails. 

On the court, she turns back to the eternal victor. He’s got his fingers under the sweatband keeping his abundant hair out of his face, a tic that has been noted since his early career in the sport, and can’t even dignify her mistake by making eye contact with her.

It’s not totally her fault.

That orange tank top he’s wearing is way too distracting. It stretches taut in all the right places so she can see the shape of him underneath. All she can think about is cuddling in a plush orange bed. His chest just looks _comfy._

And he’s large enough to _be_ the bed.

_“You’re in outer space again.”_

Ben Solo is light on his feet for such a big guy, bounding in a particularly annoyed tight half-circle when he gets a point too easily. 

Dissatisfied because it’s not an even match.

She’s seen a lot of that move this summer.

While he certainly looks plush and comforting: he’s a prickly opponent and a strict instructor. Not exactly what she expected when at the end of another agonizing dinner at The Club with grandfather, Leia Organa took her elbow to walk her down the steps to the valet stand and excitedly explained it had all been arranged for her son to give her tennis lessons. Ones that Rey did not ask for. 

It was all quite neatly arranged. 

Ben Solo is a teacher, giving lessons by recommendation from his mother to those frequenting the country club both of their families were imposing staples in, so he had to be used to playing people who were much worse than him by now. Rey isn’t a foreign character in his usual clientele, mostly teenage daughters needing something to keep them out of trouble on weekends or bored housewives with apparently very stupid husbands. He’s not training future Olympians, even though he certainly could. And with the trophies she’s seen in his family’s…well… _entire room_ dedicated to his trophies, he’s had more practice at playing people who were worse at tennis than him than anyone else in the world. 

Yet he’s a very bad sport for someone who is winning. She’s one point down and he’s pacing the court like a noble lawyer in a courtroom drama. He can somehow pull it off, even in the headband and short shorts. He’d stare at the ground in the July heat as if he was Atticus Finch trying to pluck up the moral standing to make sense of this miscarriage of justice.

Miscarriage of justice being that he is cursed to win against some old family rival’s teenage granddaughter in a private court every morning to well into the afternoon for the rest of the summer. Sheev clearly wanted her out of trouble by keeping her busy, as misguided as this arrangement seems in its utterly failure to keep trouble far from her mind.

His career is over: but his discipline isn’t. She can see how rigorously he maintains every echo of the past. Yes flinches away when his mother boasts about it. Maybe it’s the family at the root of all of it. That something _his_ is _theirs._

In the midst of her heavy fantasies, she can’t entirely blame Ben from expressing his extreme boredom with the entire situation.

When Rey was Ben Solo’s opponent, it was really easy to score.

* * *

_“And then you just rooooll the hair up around the juice cans…”_

Rey wrinkles her nose to the usually-pleasant, sunshine-y smell of orange juice. It’s summer, with the light pouring down from the kitchen window with almost a solid weight to it, so it should be kind of fitting. 

She typically likes the smell of orange juice: just not so close to her _head._

Rose swipes some of the admirable black waves that frame her face behind her ears, just to focus on her task, sliding a few bobby pins into the halo of juice cans that crowned Rey’s head. 

“Am I going to smell like orange juice?”

Rose’s lips thin out as she peers at the metal that Rey’s hair is looped around, maybe a dozen tin cans, all for a nice beachy set of waves. 

“Maybe we should have washed them twice.”

“Rose!” 

She swipes a hand out with to slap Rose’s arm: but it aggravates her full stomach that sloshes with orange juice. The cook made fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning for her Grandfather, and it took some wheedling to get the proper amount they needed to give Rey Farrah Fawcett waves to be honored as an addition to the grocery list. Drinking it all in one afternoon to use the cans...was a bad idea. Both of them were bouncing on their heels with an insistent need to run to the bathroom, and this was tricky work that required focus. 

“Are you sure this is right?”

Rey watches nervously as Rose retrieves the abandoned copy of _Tiger Beat_ on the floor. It’s a loud pop of color in her grandfather’s dour old house: though Rey doubts they’d accept any bright colors she’s more inclined to even if she did try to have her new room repainted. She should trust Rose, with the springy waves that frame out from her face, that there will at least be some curl.

This is a weird new life. Rose is a weird new friend. Rose is perfectly normal, of course, but since Rey came to live with her long-lost Grandfather in Greenwich she didn’t have a single thing that matched her old life. School. Friends.

She blinks sadly at the gray walls. 

_Color scheme._

“It _should_ be working. We just have to spray it.”

Even if she was weird _for Rey,_ at least Rose was a bright spot since she started at her new school, and would be close by where Rey attended Smith in the Fall. 

“If we do this…” Rose tightens one of the homemade rollers against her scalp, making Rey wince, _“every day_ until September, then we should have it mastered by the time we go off to college.”

Rey slouches on her bed as a wash of aerosol baptizes her. Squinting tight even under the flat of Rose’s hand shielding her eyes.

“Yeah, right.”

That feels impossibly far away. 

Rose looks like she’s just fussing over it now, and Rey is suffering from a belly swollen with too much orange juice.

“I gotta go.”

“Rey! I have to check if it’s setting right!”

“I have to _go!”_

Grandfather disapproved of running in the house, but he disapproved of a lot of things, and Rey disregards that rule as she dashes down the dark hall because this was an _emergency._

* * *

  
  


After she washes her hands, Rey takes a look at her comically-arranged head, the clusters of clunky-looking tin cans wrapped with delicate sections of hair. 

She tests the stiffness of the hairspray sealing it there with her fingertips, and faintly hears the egg timer in her room ding from the distance down the hall. It echoes a little creepily, like the heavy, dark mahogany is trapping a little chirping bird inside. 

The house was always this quiet. Sound travelled.

Rey gingerly removes one of the cans, and a section of curl unravels. The waves collect a shine from the bathroom light. It’s pretty.

With a grin, Rey grabs for another juice can, un-spiraling it quickly. In a few minutes time, a length of shiny waves reaches just above her shoulders. She ruffles her hair, feeling very clever, like some secret of adulthood has been gifted to her through some ancient goddess: this is how to be a woman instead of a little girl with her hair tied back in a knot.

She makes a little face at herself in the mirror, smiling, smoldering, even looking angry. There’s a moment when her brow narrows into sharpness that she swings her head back slightly, blinking at herself. 

There’s a severity in her stare that she doesn’t recognize. 

In the scrap heap she was apparently rescued from, it was easier to smile. Now that she is polished smooth from that old self, with new hair, it feels like she has to work at it. 

Her face is more angular this way, it makes all her expressions feel less marooned by the weight of her heart but instead a tool that she needs to learn how to use. She has had a hard time lately picturing herself at Smith in the fall: but this girl could be a student there.

“You’re a Palpatine now,” she tells herself miserably, and a clawed hand musses her curls at her scalp and tilts the fluffed head coquettishly. It does little to make the words seem more true. 

_This_ girl could belong in this strange, cloistered house, and not feel so raw and awkward.

Maybe. With practice.

* * *

Her first lesson with her unrolled curls, she wonders for a moment if they’re really working. The level of assembly required to reach adulthood finally reached. 

Ben clambers in, on time but chaotically so somehow, punctual but aggravated about it as always. 

He never drives here. He emerges from the trees that line the edge of the property and surround the far wall of the court. He runs that same footpath every night. Technically it’s the fastest way, on foot from the Organas without the formality of navigating the driveways, but it feels like he’s not even supposed to be here without his car in the gravel driveway and a maid offering him a glass of water before they start. 

He avoids being inside the house. She understands. She gets a new life, new family, more resources than she knows what to do with: but she lives under the black cloud of her grandfather. 

It’s lonelier than when she was on her own. There was hope in coming from nothing. Endless possibility. 

Now she had to be a Palpatine. 

He’s carefully extracting his racket from its case and not even looking at her, his typical habit of barely sparing her a glance socially.

He doesn’t seem to notice the hair. 

At least not until later, when she pulls a muscle. 

She’s doing better, their match falling into an almost companionable rhythm. It’s only until she lunges to hit one of his low volleys back that pain sears up the length of her calf. 

“Shit.”

She’s in a ball on the ground, curls falling stylishly over her face, which is maybe the only saving grace for how unseductive it is to be reduced to a mass of pain in front of his eyes. 

“Here.”

A hand takes her shoulder and presses her down. Confused, Rey follows, until she’s gently resting on her back on the court. Her skirt riding up her thighs. Eyes wild on the blue sky above when her own knee presses into her chest. 

She keeps her hands over the twisting muscle. His hands bracket hers. 

Ben hunches over her, a look of concern on his face. Working her legs like a doll’s, checking the joints to the furthest degree of their hinges. Bending and straightening her under his hands.

“You need to stretch more,” he chastises in a voice much more gentle than his typical scolding. 

Ben rests between her feet and removes her leg from her own grasping clutches. She blinks at him when his massive hand wraps around her calf. The muscle quivers and seizes under his hand. She yelps.

“Drink,” he instructs, handing her a water bottle. She tilts her head up and drinks gratefully as he massages the cramping away.

All she can think about is the pain for the first minute of kneading, but then it gentles to a languorous massage that has her holding her breath as she stares up at him. 

Once it’s limp enough under his touch, he rests it to the side and claims her other leg. He continues to treat her other, unharmed leg with the same care. 

He’s such a large presence hulking above her, with her knee tucked to her chest and the other soothed leg along the length of his knelt body. But maybe everything is more intimidating when it reduces you to a state where you can’t breathe. 

His touch coils up her muscle and sends trembles to the insides of her thighs. He doesn’t seem to notice the effect he’s having on her: but to her it feels so massive, so scary and raw...

He glances down at her face and his hands go still on her skin.

“Your hair,” he says simply.

It’s like being handed the sun. All that work paid off.

Rey lifts herself up on her elbow. She ruffles the waves, thoroughly pleased.

“Oh?”

“You’ve got some, uh, guck in it,” and Ben grows closer to her than his professional distance has ever allowed, and swipes up a curl between two fingers. 

Rey’s lips press together when he delicately removes the fleck of orange pulp from the brown strands. There’s a mild smell of citrus: but it’s lost on the cloud of mortification. 

She pulls away in time to salvage some of her dignity, but not much. She rolls onto her side then is up on her knees and just as quickly on her feet to scurry away from him. 

The lesson continues without much talking and it’s the only thing he ever says about her hair.

Next time she and Rose do her hair, she’s washing the cans three times first.


	2. Chapter 2

Rey gets tanner every day on the court with Ben. She likes it. A summer habit has been taken up in admiring the new freckles that appear on her brow, her nose, and her cheeks at the end of each sweltering day in the mirror. Maybe the rare perk of this and all of the stupid white dresses she has to wear for this is in the golden glow of her limbs. The little skirt bouncing up her legs with each bound at least exposes the skin underneath to a deep tan by the end of June.

Ben, however, is still deathly pale in certain light. She can sometimes see his skin getting golden as a perfectly toasted marshmallow in the afternoon sun, but in the shadows of the trees when he jogs passed the property at night, he looks like he’s made of quicksilver. 

Her legs honestly look amazing from this training. She admires them in her mirror when she gets dressed. Bounding across the court has chorded them with leonine muscle that she pokes at curiously when she shaves her legs every night, quivering from the lingering exertion of the sport. To him she’s a spoiled princess (which is the furthest thing from the truth) so he works her extra hard during her lessons. She’s much more athletic after a month of his near-silent practices, scant of conversation but leaden with orders, and she has to give him some credit for that. 

This was her grandfather’s idea. An acceptable hobby to keep her out of trouble. One that did not suit her entirely, but just fine. Too distrustful of the horses. Not enough of a prodigy for any instruments. 

Wiley enough for tennis, then, to burn off that excess energy.

The problem with tennis is that when it’s going well, it’s just…

_ Whop. _

**Whop.**

**_Whop._ **

_ Whop. _

Back and forth. A good tennis match was just hitting a ball back and forth for eternity. 

And Ben knows when she’s unskilled and when she’s just bored. She can tell after a while he’d just rather her be truly awful at it.

He casts her a dubious look when the fence behind her clatters upon impact of a ball.

“Five laps around the court.”

She tosses her racket aside dramatically. She’d seen a grainy film reel of his matches, courtesy of his mother, basically a home movie except for the scope of the crowd watching, and  _ he _ was one for throwing things when they didn’t go his way. 

_ “Why?” _

He doesn’t even lift his eyes from her as her racket bounces against the fence.

“You threw it on purpose.”

“I did not.”

He points to the little gated entrance to the court. Indicating her punishment.

“The second you get bored, you stop trying.”

She pants for a second, even though today’s singles match had hardly exhausted the resources of her energy. The arguing certainly has, though.

There is something odd about the way he’s teaching her. Anyone could tell her grandfather just wanted her up to par for a social game of tennis. With another couple, or if she couldn’t be pawned off in college to be properly married, perhaps a friendly match between business partners that was more about building a relationship for a good deal. Tennis was to be  _ useful. _

Or at least make  _ her _ useful.

But Ben is making an athlete out of her: she’s not sure if she resents it or appreciates the blatant defiance of Sheev Palpatine’s expectations that he gets a fierce competitor instead. She gets tingles every time from the deliberate, low way he now instructs her to stretch at the beginning of her lessons since the pulled muscle incident, but she’s not sure that’s his intention.

“Fine,” she grumbles, and it still takes a moment for their eyes to leave each other before she turns on her heel and trots off.

There’s something wired about her lately, physically driven to motion with the slightest nudge, like a swing that had been twisted by the ropes in so many circles that the minute your foot left the earth below it, it would spin out of control. Running was much, much easier after a few weeks of his lessons, it felt as natural as breathing to break out into a sprint across the lawns to the point it didn’t even feel like a punishment anymore. 

Though she tries to keep her eyes from the grounds. Especially the length of the driveway. When she was driven up that gravel path six months ago, it was like her hope was being crushed. She belonged here now: the answer to the question beyond her imaginings but also somewhat breaking her heart by being answered.  _ This _ was apparently who she was now, or always, and had been living the wrong life. And in her time catching up at her schooling and trying to fit in and failing and facing the expectations of a family she didn’t recognize: she didn’t like who she was supposed to be one bit. 

She punts a shrubbery on her lap back to the court and feels a little bit better. 

Finding her family had ended up much lonelier than waiting for it.

Maybe this was why she liked Ben, more than the object of desire that appeared in a yellow tank top at her first lesson, or pranced around on Leia’s projector screening, cursing and spitting at some European tournament. He belonged here almost resentfully, and wore an air of lack-of-belonging casually over his shoulders, like a sweater to be shrugged on when it got too cold. Something about this life couldn’t leave him, like in the sunglasses he wore to practice and the careless way he treated his sports car: but there was also a discomfort she empathized with: a twitch to his hands in the dining room at the club, him only seeming to relax when he peeled away from his mother to get a drink and chat with the bartender, or the runs he took every night as if attempting an escape. 

He is a romantic figure to her, and that’s what summer is about. And if he’s coolly off-limits: teasing is another option.

_ “You should be the one who has to run, _ ” she tosses at him breathlessly when she gets back from her laps, “if you can’t even keep me interested.”

_ “Excuse me?” _

He’s not exactly a domineering teacher. He’s a pain, and he certainly doesn’t just let her smoke cigarettes and flirt like most of the other girls who Rey met through her grandfather’s club get to do with whatever supervised hobby they are given each summer. Rose got to second base with her Piano tutor last week during a lesson and shows no sign of breaking her streak. There’s a hefty wall of shrubbery lining the court: it’s not like anyone’s making sure this coaching is going well, for all the progress she’s making she might as well be flipping through a comic book while he sleeps through his paid time. 

He’s simply not an instructor that just lets her get away with that and takes his money without complaint. He works her fairly. He’s professional, if a little bit of a blown fuse. She can tell it’s there, but his legendary rage has yet to make an appearance to Rey as his opponent. That may be because she’s not that good to truly test him yet, but she can sense a restraint that she appreciates. 

But his tone is pure menace at her mocking jab.

“Make it interesting,” she digs, baring her teeth at him.

He stares into her eyes and takes a few steps away. This. This looks like his days as a Pro. Fuming. Ready to throw things. Flickering on Leia’s projector as people cluck their tongues into their drinks, Rey glued with fascination and horror to the film, knowing he’s going to win but watching him fight for it.

It makes his authority more interesting to her.

He points his racket at her. 

“Every point I gain, you lose an item of clothing.”

She thinks he’s joking. An abrupt laugh leaves her throat and echoes through the pristine grounds of her grandfather’s estate. But he just keeps looking at her as she tries to catch her breath.

“Just me?” she whispers dryly, not meaning to lose her voice.

His chest expands under the thin cotton of his tee-shirt. 

_ “Just you,” _ he repeats ponderously, not as an answer but certainly a response. 

It hangs in the air between them, Rey twisting and fidgeting because maybe she wants to do this, maybe she doesn’t, and she doesn’t know where to start in this debate. 

She  _ wants _ to be naked in his proximity, because it feels dirty and kind of right, but in order to do so, agreeing to a game where he is essentially stripping her point by point seems a little too vulnerable for a first go at it.

Yet compelling.

After a moment of deep breathing, he shakes his head.

“If you get a point, I’ll take something off.”

Now she is interested. It seems more fair.

“What are you trying to accomplish here?”

His racket whips through the air with an audible  _ whoosh _ as he primes a test-swing, warming up for a match.

“Hopefully, a tie.”

Rey crosses her arms.

“You just want to get me naked.”

“You need motivation,” he looks at her quizzically, “and  _ you said _ to make it interesting.”

“By taking your clothes off?”

Ben actually looks a little offended, “No, because you want to keep yours on, don’t you?”

Right. While the leery nature of the game was obvious, she supposes that could be the reverse of a pretty stupid dare. As if she’s a pervert for thinking it’s about seeing each other naked. This is serious conditioning, from her coach, for sport.

Getting naked was a  _ punishment.  _ Something meant to be prevented. The thrill that went through her was something to be embarrassed of. _Not like that_ parrots through her mind: something sharp and cruel and withholding that she's been hearing in this town for months now.

But there’s a knowing glint in his eye for just a flash once her face blanches in shame, and she swears he’s doing this purely to interest himself. 

And then it’s gone.

He goes back to the cool distance that keeps these lessons so boring. 

He serves.

And she struggles to keep up. 

It takes longer for him to score this time. As if Rey is actually defending her virtue, not her pride. By the time it happens, they’ve been playing for the longest stretch without a single point scored of the entire summer and not a single word uttered. She’s red in the face and most of her hair is coming loose, falling over her eyes as she darts to parry each of his swings.

So is his hair, his sweatband slipping and spilling black strands across his face, which is narrowed into focus.

Her muscles are pulsing with exertion, and her ankle catches at the last second, and she actually cares very much when the ball whizzes past her and the fence rattles with the impact. 

“Okay, better,” he concludes, and it very much does sound like he’s wrapping up this lesson, “so next time…”

Rey kicks off one of her shoes and launches it to the sideline of the court.

He stares at her, speechless. Eyes lowering incredulously from her face to her foot stripped of one sneaker. 

The air between them seems to tighten, like an invisible string, and they can’t pull away from each other. A challenge accepted. 

They were really playing.

“So that’s my point,” he tests slowly, and she stares breathlessly at him to tell him this game isn’t over for her.

The next serve goes off like a gunshot. 

It feels like fighting. It feels  _ good. _ Like an aggression she was never allowed to vent, a frustration that was never free to be shared, is let loose and she battles it out by hitting it, and  _ hard. _ He lets her wail on the ball and gives it a good momentum for her to just keep striking back. 

She loses another shoe. She doesn’t care. Socks next and it almost feels good to peel them off. Losing be damned.

It’s about more than that.

He seems to get it.

It feels like life and death when they stop to register the point. 

Her point.

By this time Ben is losing his breath as well. 

He crouches down when the ball cracks against the fence. She can feel the guttural sense of frustration that she scored a point against him, it nurses in his gut, she’s seen him double over like this in grainy footage on a projector in his parent’s library.

Her hand moves to fan her face while she’s distracted. Rey has never gotten this hot during an afternoon tennis lesson. Never worked up this much of a sweat. It’s like wearing a too-warm sweater for too long: and being unable to remove it immediately. The heat settles like an itch and once she thinks of being free of her clothes, they oppress her by merely existing.

He nods at her, as if to bow in respect, and removes his sweatband.

“That’s not--”

“I took something off,” he doesn’t even look at her, hooking the fuzzy band over one massive finger to casually sling-shot it to the side of the court. 

He finally does turn his eyes up to her as it lands in a sad puddle on the ground. Eyes seeming to be searching, but hiding himself, with his hair falling into his face.

He seems to be offering something. A truce, maybe.

She’s got her point. He’s made his. He looks at her like they can stop now. She’s proven her thirst for it: this competitive side. She’s  _ interested. _

A quick mental inventory brings her back to reality: she’s got underwear, her skirt, and her tee-shirt and bra. He’s got his shoes, socks, shirt, shorts...and hopefully something else on underneath the shorts…

“Keep playing,” she blurts out, and even from across the court she sees his smug grin at her newfound enthusiasm.

It vanishes quickly when the ball bounces just at the inside of the line and he doesn’t make it in time.

Her next point. 

He takes his shirt off.

She loses any girlish belief that this was a flirtation with how business-like he holds himself. His face is gravely serious and he just...stands in the center of it all in his shorts and socks and shoes. Like nothing is off. 

Warmth radiating off bare his skin like a second sun.

Rey sputters indignantly as he strips, red in the face, and he shoots her an incredulous look.

“You couldn’t leave your shirt on and take off your  _ shoes?” _

“I play better with my shoes on,” he points his racket at her ragged, bare feet, “you’ll regret that decision later.”

“You just want me to take my clothes off.”

Ben shakes his head.

“No, I’m just telling you that strategy is better than modesty. You’ll lose more clothing if your playing is bad.”

“I get the point of the game.”

“Depends on what your goal is,” he rolls his shoulders,  _ and there it is, _ that slightly tilted glance that makes her feel like he’s treating her like an adult. “Winning or…”

“Or what?”

He nods at her to indicate she serve. 

So she does. 

Once the ball bounces on his side of the court, he strikes hard. She almost yelps as she desperately swings to volley it back. 

His point. 

He seems ready enough to go back to the lesson.

“All of this,” he gestures from the courts to the property surrounding.  _ All of it, _ “proves you work too hard to ever be disinterested.”

Sweat drips down her cheek. The body creates sweat to cool overheated skin, it also releases toxins, which is what he taught her when she called it disgusting her first week. Insisting it was good for her.

Rey levels her eyes at him. It feels good to sweat. Like she’s back to her old self. Someone who actually had something to fight for other than predestined crap.

“So do you,” she shoots back. 

His eyes narrow but he doesn't deny it.

Rey grits her teeth and reaches for her shirt, because there’s not much else to take off. Her skirt bounces around her thighs so much that removing her underwear is a no-go if they keep playing. 

She can tell his training some indifference behind his eyes, a game face, because they are locked on her as she slides the white tee-shirt over her head. A lilac cotton bra is her only cover, perhaps less flesh-baring than a tiny bikini top. But it’s thin, and vulnerable, and he won’t stop looking.

Ben glances up at her face, which takes some softening to his expression to make her capable of meeting his eyes. Her shoulders slump and her stomach curves inward as if someone moved to punch it. A fist threatened but never landed.

It’s weird to be this proud of her body, at least for her, but it’s been a summer of rich food and abundant exercise, so under his tutelage it’s shaped into something lean and tan and strong. She feels this flame of pleasure that she’s enjoying it to have him look at what he helped shape.

She wants the skirt gone. Bra next. Panties too.

Just her and his skin, warm and solid, somewhere to rest her cheek and cuddle into...

This certainly feels like the exact kind of trouble that Ben was hired to prevent. His eyes widen when she gives pause to his fair point.

“I shouldn’t--” Ben spins his racket in his hand, glancing down at the concrete with a curse. “I forfeit.”

She doesn’t know why it hurts. 

She doesn’t know why she’s wondering if her curls look pretty or just wild tucked behind her ears, or if he can see how red her face is, or if neither of them can seem to breathe from the competition or whatever it is between them that’s tightening and twisting. Every time she pictures that massive chest against her body it always, no matter how gentle the fantasy, hits her like a football tackle. She knows at this moment it would be that impactful. She’s scared now to have him touch her, as his fidgeting hands seem to tell her he wants to, not because it would hurt her but because it would change her, like hurting often does. That’s worse than pain.

She’s not sure if she’s ready to be altered. 

Rey crosses her hands over her bare, freckled stomach. Her racket fans up primly to cover her chest with the weave, at least to do what good it can. A chill twinges at her breast as solid as if though a hand is caressing it. 

She closes her eyes and swallows. 

This is fucking embarrassing, and she always thought it was the guy’s job to make it better. Do something so how unbearable this felt to be naked, alone, was smothered in easily distractible romance. After showing him all: _my tits want to bounce for you, my legs want to stretch for you, my skin is hot and wants yours._

Ben just looks at her and makes her own in her decision to keep playing.

Rey points her racket at him.

“If _you_ lose,” she licks her lips. He’s staring at her still. Even though they shouldn’t be doing this. Even if it’s just a bra. “Then you’re the one who has to run laps.”

Ben Solo bows his head like a graceful loser, and obediently trots to the side of the court to collect his shirt and put it back on. Rey lets out a deep, long-held breath, her stomach almost aches from the tensed way she’d been holding it. He weaves out the gate of the court and she can hear the pounding of his feet in the grass.

She’s no stranger to that sound. She can hear it in the distance every night as he jogs past their house, him barely skating by their driveway, every night just as the sun is going down.

It’s a tidal push and pull in the muscles of her thighs. It’s a tightness in her belly. It’s how her chest feels like it’s empty of organs and only filled with fragile air.

That is the something that tells her she could have asked for anything else from him and he would still obey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Birthday to me.


	3. Chapter 3

“If it isn’t the mighty Skywalkers!”

Rey nearly drops the  _ wrong _ knife she’d currently been using to butter a roll. It’s probably the wrong knife. There’s just too many options. 

She may be as much of a stranger to this place as anyone, but her grandfather’s intentional misuse of Leia’s maiden name is as glaringly awkward to her as anyone else in the room whose family  _ went back centuries. _ Even she, who went back a span of months, knows the mistake is intentional and scrapes like the wrong blade. 

She wants to bury herself under the tablecloth. 

And if her grandfather is addressing more than one of them...

She tries not to turn bright red when a light blue polo shirt fills the corner of her vision. She shuts her eyes tight instead of looking directly at him. Smelling his clean skin, coddled in mis-summer humidity, hovering above her shoulder while she sat like he had never seen the shape of her breasts under her sweater.

Someone’s mother still made him dress up for dinner at the club.

“Palpatine,” Leia replies crisply, “and Rey. Dear. How are you?”

She twists her napkin in her lap. She still can’t even look at Ben yet. 

What happened this afternoon would have been wild and invigorating with maybe any other person in the world: but with Ben she felt a sting of condemnation, and facing him so soon afterwards is mortifying. He is perhaps no colder to her than usual, but when she craved a little warmth to soothe her fear… 

It is strange how she could do filthier and feel less with anyone else in the world: but his eyes on her just seeing a faint outline of her nipples was a searing touch that now she suffered from lack of warmth.

Rey clears her throat awkwardly.

“I’m well, Leia, thank you.”

Leia smiles warmly, but pointedly, only at Rey. Rey was surprised Leia was so keen on the idea of Ben giving Rey lessons when she clearly disliked Sheev so much.

Her grandfather seems entirely too pleased.

“You must join us.”

Leia waves too quickly for it to be a demure rejection.

“Oh, we have a…”

“I insist. It’s been a long time since our families have shared a table.”

Leia stalls for a moment, but seems to withdraw her rejection when Rey hides her face, hanging it down over her bread plate. That is the only blessing of her grandfather’s social discomfort: interactions are brief, excuses come quickly.

Rey wants someone to spare her from this dinner, but she’d never inflict it on anyone else…

“Ben has been quiet about your lessons,” Leia slides into the seat across from her. Rey’s mouth goes dry. “How have you two been getting along?”

A flash of cold fear strikes through her: just for a moment, as if the court they’d stripped down on this afternoon was an arena of jeering onlookers and not a cluster of spruce trees. 

As if struck by the same fear, Ben’s nostrils flare.

“Just fine,” her reply is cheery enough, but brittle. 

Leia seems to see through the cracks of it quickly enough.

“That legendary temper hasn’t gotten to you yet?”

Ben clenches his fists at his sides, no one can see it but Rey from where he’s standing beside her, seeming to realize too late he was trapped. She half expects him to just walk out of the club. 

He slides into the seat next to her after a tense moment of silence.

“We get along just fine,” he answers crisply, reaching for the bread basket. “She has a natural aptitude for the sport.”

“That’s lovely to hear,” Sheev cuts in, seeming to notice that whatever was going on between the three of them involved three separate relationships that ran deeper than any of his. Even Rey, which might explain his territorial tone. 

Rey always liked Leia, a monument to a world Rey didn’t understand, but kind to her. A few cocktail parties in the Spring forged this awkward bond: her grandfather through no uncertain terms let Rey know that he was deeply insulted they weren’t getting invitations to Organa get-togethers until Rey had joined the household. During those parties Leia took Rey under her wing and introduced her around. Leia seemed to know Rey lacked company in the big house, and probably set up the tennis lessons as a sense of obligation. One for which Rey was surprisingly grateful, despite how difficult Ben was. He was better company than none. 

He was a regular wet blanket at her side right now, however. His face was sour at the bravado with which her grandfather addressed him: 

“I’m happy we had the court installed, then. Ben, you looked utterly famished, I want you to order whatever you like and don’t make me have to tell you twice.”

“The court was installed a long time ago,” Leia seems caught on this detail, though Rey is not sure why. Like there was a glaring mistruth and it needed to be remarked upon. “I’m surprised you are only thankful for it now. You were always so quick to bring up those matches against my father on your property.”

“A proud union, professionally,” Sheev’s smile is stale, “One he’d be eager to replicate between our families these days. Your father would be very proud to see the young ones batting it out.”

Leia doesn’t give an indicator of how much this disgusts her of her own body: but the air in the room gets colder to show how much she hates this conversation. She doesn’t move, but her eyes are steely, and Rey withdraws further in her seat, chewing mutely on a bread roll. 

Ben is stiff and eerily silent beside Rey. He doesn’t even have to pretend anymore that nothing was going on between them. His distaste is obvious enough. She was just soft skin over veins running with bad blood. All it took was one taste and he couldn’t stand it.

She fiddles with her napkin and wants to disappear. 

Funny how her grandfather shoving them together is the fastest way to make Ben lose interest in the tenuous connection they were making.

Leia doesn’t hide the depth of the insult she perceived from this comment: it’s bone-deep, like a chill or the smell of wet dog. 

This hasn’t been Rey’s family long enough to know exactly what’s going on here. But she doesn’t like being foisted upon Leia and her son.

Sheev chuckles.

“Of course I’m merely joking. But do you not think that these young ones are suited to each other?”

Rey’s empty stomach soured. By then a waiter had arrived to the table in time for Ben to crisply whisper, so only Rey could hear:

_ “No.” _

Sheev cranes his head and tilts his ear, feigning a certain deafness with a smile creeping across his face. “What?”

The waiter pauses at the end of the table, pretending to not perceive what’s going on at the table, even though old Sheev has now directly narrowed everyone’s sights on what Ben muttered. Leia’s. Rey’s. She’s pretty sure everyone else’s, as the table next to them goes silent.

And Ben then licks his lips carefully, staring at his glass, and then glances up and repeats it once more, so now everyone can. 

“I don’t see it at all.”

* * *

There’s a polite viewing of fireworks on the golf course. 

Rose holds Rey’s hand as they trip down the incline of the fourth hole together, light skirts swishing like moth wings in the dusk. Rose wears a cream-color outfit, Rey is in white.

They are both eating popsicles very carefully to prevent getting red, white, and electric-blue drips on those dresses.

The  _ boom _ above their heads makes Rey flinch a little. There’s a rain of red sparks and a round of polite applause each time. She couldn’t excuse herself for the evening from this patriotic event, she always had to hoard her excuses wisely for better uses, and Rose would at least be there, so at least she would feel a little less alone even after what happened at dinner. They could look like they were staying out of trouble while they clung to each other and whispered as they walked through the crisply cut grass. But appearances were deceiving. 

Rey kept her steps light. Dew was soaking into her sneakers. Rose was more hurried, because there were plans to sneak off with her piano teacher at hole nine. 

“Hux is bringing beers,” Rose whispers to her, as Rey nibbles a slushy part of the ice that threatens to pool down the stick. “If you want any.”

Rey is glad to cover for her. She could sit in the grass and breathe a while, perhaps, because solitude in her grandfather’s house felt closely monitored, and solitude elsewhere was not permitted. That’s why there were tennis lessons, and Rose, and country clubs where everyone reported to her grandfather.

She is aware of solitude in a profoundly raw way when they reach the ninth hole and Rose launches herself into the shadowed, rustling bushes with perfect trust. Some instinctive sense that her lover was waiting for her there. A ginger head appears out of the brush, Rose in his arms, and gives Rey an awkward nod in thanks for her role of escort for the evening, but even sharper is the suggestion in his eyes that she leaves them alone now that she has done her job.

Rose peeks out of the leaves to extend a beer in offer to Rey, a gift of gratitude for the assistance, but instead of taking it Rey gives a cheerful wave and weaves through the course, away from the spectators of the fireworks. She crunches the red tip of the popsicle between her teeth and shudders when the ice works its way against her gums. 

Being alone after being scorned as she was by Ben at dinner is a strange feeling. She hasn’t had the chance to be  _ alone _ with it until now. Dinner was painful, she and Ben had to talk about each other as the only connective tissue between the families while they were obviously not talking to each other. Leia was gracious and walked out of the club with Rey’s arm linked in hers. Making her feel more welcome than she realistically could be. Now that she has relative quiet and solitude, his slight burns her. She feels raw like the open-aired loneliness, raw like an insulted girl, and raw like not knowing what is next and fucking cold, teeth-chattering cold, but doesn’t think to stop putting ice in her mouth in the dark.

**Boom.**

She jumps at the cannonball-sound of another firework going off. There’s a rattling crackling in the spark’s wake that sounds like gunfire against a metal trash can.

These noises aren’t really fun for her.

The painful part of being seen was the inability to be unseen. She’d showed something this afternoon and only now did he want to tell her he didn’t want it. That’s not fair. She should be allowed to take it back. 

She spent the rest of dinner unable to look at him. 

She doesn’t collide with him again until his nightly run. The two of them almost melted into full darkness.

She sees him jogging through the dusk at the edges of the court, his typical loop that leads him through the woods behind her grandfather’s house, the same route that brings him to her lessons.

Literally, she does collide with him: perhaps ill-advised, she means to get his attention but smacks right into him when she loses him in a patch of trees. It’s like hitting a brick wall at full speed, she gets knocked off course far more than he does. 

She can feel the impact rattling in her bones.

He hadn’t gotten as far into the woods as she’d anticipated. Her instincts aren’t as sharp as Rose’s, perhaps because Ben Solo is not, by any definition of the word, her lover.

She almost drops her popsicle, but in some hindbrain survivalism, rescues it by clenching the stick in her fist.

“Rey, fuck,” he stumbles away from her, a look of annoyance layered over a base of concern. Because for her to be here, there had to be something wrong in the world, didn’t there?

She feels the sugared syrup of the popsicle flood the top of her hand, so she makes a point to lick it off before she speaks. She wonders briefly if it is weird of her to do that: because his eyes are wide like it’s the wildest thing he’s ever seen.

Once the dripping’s stopped and her lips are numb, she glances up at him.

“What happened during our lesson today?”

A flush rises high on her cheeks. She wasn’t sure if she had even wanted to start this conversation, or at least hoped to play it a little cooler when she did, so when it spills out of her immediately she has lost whatever grip she had on the situation.

Ben eyes her cautiously. He looks rougher than the polo-wearing man who sat at the table at dinner tonight. That tan is gone from every surface of his skin: he just glows blue-white in the last of the July dusk. His chest heaves as he catches his breath.

“A friendly tennis match.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. Now that he’s seen it exposed in her light, little bra, she holds herself self-consciously like he knows what lurks underneath her clothes.

And he looks at her a little bit like he does. 

“Ben.”

It feels like a tantrum, or a foot-stamping moment, and it coils under her tongue like bile because it doesn’t feel like what she wants to be doing: but magically, he obeys. He answers.

There is a seductive power in that which feels appealingly adult.

He glances down at the twists of grass and flowers on the trail.

“I...chose to forfeit. Before it got out of hand.”

“Out of hand how?”

The popsicle is a mess, raining red-white-and-blue onto the grass. Rey collects it between her lips and gets another weird look from Ben.

_ “Inappropriate,” _ he grits out, glancing sidelong up at her in warning. “Your grandfather hired me…”

“He’s not why I’m here. And he’s not why you’re here right now.”

Rey shivers with an apparent loss of nerve. Ben stares at her, his dark eyes unfathomable.

He grabs her hand and launches her ice cream into the woods. 

_ “Hey.” _

He goes on as if she hadn’t protested:

“This isn’t a good idea.”

“Why not? You’re not too old for me. Not in this neighborhood. It’s only weird because you wouldn’t have had a wife just to leave her for me, like everybody else does.”

The disparity in ages went unremarked upon: but Rey could pick up on things. Men with their children at the table at the club with a too-young wife being the wrong age for his child or his contemporary, a new addition or replacement in the family. Mismatched nuptials. Her grandfather had grunted something to her about the crop of divorcees in the last decade, with women’s lib being cited as the root of all evil. But in this place, the divorcees filling the workplace were not present. They left a gap filled by someone not much older than Rey. At least Ben didn’t have a wife, didn’t have children, so Rey could hardly justify any criticism for two single people liking each other.

They weren’t breaking anything meant to remain unbroken. This was just starting with two things that were separate and whole. Unfinished maybe, herself not fully formed, but the sapling of a tree was not a broken tree just like she in her youth was not a broken person. 

Or would he deem her deficient like everyone else. 

Ben shakes his head.

“Being too old for you isn’t the first thing on the list of reasons I wouldn’t be good for you.”

“It’s  _ summer,” _ Rey shrugs, like that explains all of it, “and I’ve been waiting for a long time to feel the way you make me feel.”

“Waiting to grow up at your age isn’t a punishment.”

“It’s a prison,” she wheedles.

It felt like it. Trembling and impatient, waiting for the world to offer her a hand to grab in order to climb up and see it from the right height. 

He doesn’t stir, blinking at her as she lifts her sweater over her head and drops it to the grassy trail. Fireflies disperse from the clump of grass it falls to. It’s not the same bra as this morning, perhaps no lovelier or no uglier than whatever she wore to her lesson. She didn’t dress knowing this is what she’d choose when she found him. Whatever fit beneath the v-neck sweater she wore to the club. It hugs her tits to their natural shape, soft, smelling potently of fabric softener. It might just be an evening breeze, but she swears she can hear him inhaling it.

“So it’s not inappropriate now,” she crosses her arms, “because this has nothing to do with my lessons. This is about what  _ I _ want.”

Her grandfather’s behavior may have killed any chance of that happening. Maybe it would be too repulsive for Ben to want her, knowing her grandfather encouraged this.

He glances up at her. If before he seemed unmoved, it is only because she was too chickenshit to meet his eyes until now. They bore into her with an unhinged sense of power. 

His hands move to cover the small trunk of her bare waist. 

“What do you want?”

She sifts the silky hair that covers his ear out of the way. Once her hands are on him, they are worrying and idle. Her thumbs circle, her fingers search. They wander his skin until they end up in places far from where they first landed on him.

“To lose today’s game…”

She watched his chest collapse slightly at the exhale from her words. He collected her closer, gently, his touch curious but not quite starting.

“Why?”

Rey glanced over her shoulder and caught his hand, pulling him towards the court. At least it was secluded enough. With less sticks. 

The gate closed quietly behind her, and she plucked open the button holding her skirt high on her waist. It dropped to the ground easily. 

“If I lost,” she glances over her shoulder at him, “which I didn’t...”

“Bad sportsmanship,” Ben scolds, shucking his running tank over his head. His chest is glorious in this light, pale and broad, better than the fabric stretched over it that she’d imagined cuddling against.

“If I didn’t have any more clothes to lose, and you wanted to keep playing, when  _ you _ got a point…”

“Your mouth,” he commands easily, slipping her back in his arms and bowing his head to devour. 

He would have asked for her mouth. When she had nothing else to give on the court, he’d have asked for her mouth.

She glows in the moonlight. Her smile is not shy, for her joy isn’t, but her question is:

“You wanted this?”

“Yes,” his lips press to hers, first quick, then slow when he gets his first taste: like one lick of an ice cream cone to sample and the second to collect a slow drip down the side when it melts. There is no answer that exists to be heard but between him and herself, spoken honest and plain, “I wanted you.”

Her lips are plush and numb from the popsicle, but the lingering cold isn’t what makes her shiver in his arms.


	4. Chapter 4

They kiss for a few minutes, the game and the entire world skidding to a stop at the feeling of finality between their bodies. She loses track of her reply, clings to it, but it slips through her fingers and disappears in thin air as his lips play against hers. He whispers. He purrs, coaxes, praises. He doesn’t seem to need her to reel him in anymore. He’s there. Worrying her lips with his, gently touching his tongue to hers, purring when she whimpers at how hot and wet this feels. To have a mouth open to hers. To be open to someone else. for how right this is. 

“If I’d lost _another_ point today?” she murmurs, and he seems confused until he realizes her intention that she wanted to keep going further. After her mouth. After this. 

_ What's next? _

He was always good at adding to the challenge she posed him. 

He presses his hands to her lower back and quickly lowers them down to her ass. The squeeze of his hands around her flesh has her shivering, he bows his head to kiss her shoulder as he palms her ass over her underwear. 

“Keeping my hands off of you...watching you get tight and so fucking  _ bouncy _ over the course of a few weeks...it was a struggle.”

_ “Oh.” _

It occurs to her the oddness of doubting she existed to him until she wanted him to: maybe even earlier than she wanted to, if he could mark the changes in her over the course of his training. This was strange. Being observed. You spend so much time wanting to exist under someone's eyes, and then suddenly you do. The orange rind in your hair and the limbering of her muscles and the shape of her tits under her clothes. It was her. And he was watching it all. 

She had half-believed nothing was getting his attention until tonight, standing in her underwear on a tennis court to claim it.

The court fence jingles, there is the bite of cold lacing around her back. He has lifted her and pressed her into the fence. Her legs wrap around his body and hold him close. His lips coax up her neck. She smacks her tongue and has the lingering taste of electric blue. 

“Why’d you throw away my popsicle?”

“It was too distracting,” he has completely changed over the course of a few minutes: honest, unguarded, generous. His face nuzzles into her neck as if to assure her that she didn’t do anything wrong, it was that damn, distracting popsicle…

“You hurt my feelings tonight, at the table.”

She hopes for the same soothing in saying it: that it was distracting, it wasn’t her fault, she didn’t do anything wrong. All in between his cuddling face and lips kissing her skin. Reassuring her more. 

Instead he pulls away and gazes up at her. 

Just then, there’s the crack of another firework. Rey flinches, and she hates that he’s looking at her when she does, and she especially hates how his eyes change. 

“Your crazy grandfather is up at dawn shooting at birds,” he muses, cupping her face gently in his hand, “and yet fireworks scare you.”

“I don’t get scared by the gunfire,” she tosses her curls back from her face defiantly, also shrugging off his touch if he isn’t going to comment on his behavior at dinner, “because I can hear the birds cry first. So I know it’s coming.”

As if to prove her point, with no birdsong to signal it:

**_Boom._ **

She shivers for a different reason. Maybe someday fireworks would just be fireworks, or she wouldn’t have to hold her breath when the herons were crying in the morning. 

But right now she is not fully what she was or what she should be.

His eyes are black and shiny in the glimmers of sparks reflecting in them. For a moment he looks terribly sad for her. Which she hates. She wants him to let her be bouncy curls, a toying mouth, and a lean, supple body. That's it. 

He bows his head and kisses her shoulder. 

“I honestly don’t know how you live with him.”

It's a strange admission of his vulnerability, as if _he's_ revealing something. That he admires something about her. 

She breathes slowly, filling her lungs with warm, balmy air.

“I don’t either.”

He's silent for a moment, and Rey knows she can't move, as tempting as that, until he answers her about what happened at the table tonight.

He softens when her shin goes hard and her nostrils flare. Ben glances away, but cradles her body steadily as if securing her in his absence of attention to think on his reply.

“No one here can tolerate him...and I don’t want to think about him when I’m with you. Approving or not.”

He nips her skin and she shivers. A hand comes up to cradle her face. 

“I know for a guy like me, with someone your age, there’d be a relief in having his approval. But it makes my stomach drop. He’s always made me really uncomfortable. And it makes me...it makes you…”

Ben blinks at her like he’s lost track of what he’s saying. She presses her cheek into his large hand and nods. 

_ Was there anything this old man wouldn't ruin? _

“I can...understand that. Somewhat,” she presses him away and leans her head back against the fence. Her lids droop down over her eyes as she appraises him, “but it’s no reason to be mean to me.”

Ben swallows and nods, bowing himself to nuzzle his brow to her sternum apologetically. 

“I deserve that.”

At least he can admit when he’s lost. 

She lets the next explosion above thud through her entire body, and lets him slot himself between her thighs and tease against her. She finds comfort in his body shielding hers, like a blanket over her head during a thunderstorm.

All the pieces come together.  _ When you curl your hair it falls the right way when Ben runs his fingers through it. When you shave your legs Ben can touch them without having to think about it. When you wear a soft bra and your chest is against Ben’s, it feels right. _

“I’m not  _ his,” _ she suddenly grunts out, feeling Ben reel against her in confusion, “just because he makes it feel dirty doesn't mean I don't feel...ruined by his presence. When you can’t even look at me it’s like you think I’m his property and you’d rather leave me with him.”

“That depends on how much you can stand on your own right now,” he looks guilty as he says it, “and I’m not asking a teenager to make that call.”

Tears dot her eyes. It is kind, in its heartbreaking way, that he sees her position is precarious. He understands she could be sacrificing something based on her grandfather’s whims. It is kinder than the role she had been offering him. Just a body to experiment on.

“I just want you to be with me, without thinking about anything else,” she arches her neck, a sincerity in her request she couldn’t have planned, “we have the Summer, can’t we hide it enough to just be together?”

“Now that I’m here I'm not eager to give this up either,” he admits, teeth clenched, and adjusts her across his hips to feel just how much he’s feeling too.  _ “You're wily tonight. Would you like to cum?” _

Rey nods as one big hand cradles against the back of her neck, holding her gently. Her thighs tighten around his hips, but he rests her slightly back against the fence, and with her weight lifted he lowers her underwear out from under her skirt and untangles it from her legs. Now bare, her pussy takes the soft stroke of his gentle hand. She hisses, arching her neck, and Ben groans when the wetness pooling there for him begins to soak his skin. 

“Good girl,” he whispers, and her heart thrums in the flesh of her sex that he keeps petting like it’s good for him there, too. "Are you always eager for it? Am I that lucky? Or do I have to tease you all the time to get you like this?"

“Want you to be my first,” Rey insists with her teeth clenched. It feels like the same conversation they're having until she says it out loud. Then it's something completely different. 

Ben blinks at her. 

“You sure?”

She nods frantically with a whine when his fingers tease her next answer out:

_ “Yesss.” _

Ben kisses her shoulder while his thumb comes up to thoughtfully stroke her. 

“We’ll go slow,” he instructs her, ignoring her thighs jerking around his hips. “Just this tonight.”

Rey keens, her own hand coming to cover her mouth. His promise, but also his rule, calms and torments her. She wants it now. But the depth of what she was offering feels less terrifying that this can stop tonight and still be possible. She didn’t have to prove it by putting it all on the line right now. 

“You’re a virgin?” he asks with some interest, a lilt of intrigue and slight smugness tinting his deep voice. 

Her fingers dig sharply into his arms. 

“Yeah,” she admits, the promise feeling less vulnerable a few moments ago without him now standing her, examining it. Rey gasps when his thumb circles higher, teasing her clit, her body nearly seizing in his arms.

“Why me?”

“You’re not bad to look at, Solo.”

He snorts and gives her an indulgent, grateful kiss on her lips. Just a thanks for the compliment. 

She sobers when he pulls away to keep playing with her soaked cunt. “And…”

She’s hooked him now. He stares up at her like this answer could mean so much. 

“And...when I’m with you, I feel like what I’m doing matters. That you listen to me.”

“I do listen.”

“I know.”

“I want you to know that. That you’re not alone,” he blinks, the intensity in his eyes matching the heightened speed of his fingers on her body. His promise has her spiraling out of control. He’s got her through it, her body shaking and fighting, hovering just at an edge. 

“if you ever need me, I’m moved into the boathouse at my parents’...”

“Of course you are,” she glares at him, “perfectly good mansion twenty yards away.”

“It’s _private._ Not just for this. If you need somewhere to go that feels safe. I want to give that to you.”

“Ben.”

His offer is so earnest it makes her go cold. Her lungs fill and empty with humid summer air, deep and promising, and her face holds a flush that won’t go away. It's like an hour into one of their lessons after mere minutes of pleasure. 

His expression is very serious, even as he bows his head in focus to pet at her sopping cunt. She shuts her eyes before it all overwhelms her.

“You’re welcome there. I want to share that with you.”

_ “Ben.” _

“I’m keeping an eye on you. He won't ruin you. Not to me. You’re safe.”

She didn’t know why he knew to say those things, or how much they’d mean to her, until the next explosion of sparks thundering through the night is her own.


	5. Chapter 5

Like clockwork: there’s birdsong, there’s shouting, and then there’s gunfire.

The skin of her brow scrunches in a series of sharp, tense folds. Her muscles tense and don’t release until the flapping of wings grows more distant. There was a dead heron in the pool yesterday.

But this time as the sound goes off Ben runs his fingers up and down her spine as she tenses up in anticipation to the noise. His hands reaching under the hem of her shirt to touch her bare skin. They’ve kept their clothes on, mostly, but this is how he gets around it.

She’s shivering over his gentle touch.

“Crazy old man,” he mutters to himself.

“I assumed it was blue-blooded eccentricity.”

“I would accuse him of much worse.”

He bends his neck to kiss her, cuddled up in his bed in warm sunshine. He is as warm in the morning as he was when they were having a lesson. The summer heat should have discouraged getting closer but Rey took every opportunity to be near to him. 

They’d been just kissing for most of the morning. And the evening before. She’d made her excuses about a sleepover with Rose and taken Ben’s invitation to the boathouse. While she was frozen and petrified once every fifteen minutes about being caught: she didn’t regret coming here. 

“He’d always rant about a long-lost granddaughter,” he says somewhat vacantly, “but we all assumed he was making it up.”

Rey sits up in his bed. 

“He knew about me?”

Ben raises his eyebrows at her. She had extracted herself from his arms, and that seems to have prompted more of a reaction from him than she had anticipated.

“I don’t think personally, but he believed you were out there.”

“Then why...now?”

She looks down at her knees. This came as a bit of a shock. She’d been brought to the house with the feeling that no one knew she had existed until recently. The fact that he had chosen now to find her felt...uneasy.

Ben gently pries her back down to his side and kisses her cheek.

“Let’s talk about something else.”

She props herself up with her hands on his chest. That’s probably a better idea.

“Like what?”

His fingers gently guided her chin forward. A smile pricks his lips, but is smoothed by the touch of hers.

When she’s fully relaxed into the kiss, he pulls away and strokes her cheek.

“Does kissing me make you wet?”

Rey turns bright red and buries her face in his shirt. It was so conversational when he said it, but the reaction seems expectant of her to be this scandalized. 

_ “Ben.” _

“We’ve been doing a lot of it, I was curious.”

Just kissing. Just burrowing down in his bed and letting him coax her closer as slowly as possible. Their first kiss on the court was so intense, it was about getting him as joined to her as possible, and she was a wreck by the time he let her stop coming. There was so much pent up that he released from her with such generosity, that she would not have immediately gotten on her knees for him from confidence, but certainly from gratitude. 

Last night was slower. He kept her body prone but closed. He didn’t slot himself between her strong thighs until they were both getting sleepy. It was almost innocent, lying next to each other, letting her kiss him fast and slow and curious. He seemed to understand the speed wasn’t the problem, but  _ the knowing what to do _ was, so he let her touch his arms and legs and stomach and get to know the feeling of him in pieces. 

And it had made her wet. Embarrassingly so. She felt that creeping feeling in her pussy that alerted her to everything she felt ready for. Her body was slick enough to take him as many times as he liked just from kissing. But he had held back from that.

Rey shakes her hair out of her face and looks defiantly up at him. 

“You were?”

He grins softly down at her. 

“I want to know what you like.”

Taking the chance while she has it, Rey hefts one leg over his and straddles his thigh. The answer is yes, but that’s kind of embarrassing and definitely boring. She bites her lips when his limb falls between hers, and he groans at the heat of her. His hands go tight on her hips. 

Worrying her lip between her teeth, she rolls her hips. 

_ “Hmm,” _ she wonders aloud, dragging it out. “Maybe a little.”

He presses his leg up flush to her groin, which is swollen and needy from all the touches that went no further than  _ this _ last night. She whines deep in her throat in response and allows her head to fall back. He answers her body by rising up on his elbows, cupping the back of her head and kissing her vulnerable throat. 

She likes when he answers her body with his body. So she asks again by taking his hand and slipping it down the front of her shorts.

His breath leaves his lungs in a hot rush out of his nose: like a steaming boiler about to blow. She trembles as he makes little circles in the slick, curious, confident.

It doesn’t take much to get him excited. 

It takes even less for her to fold over him and cry out. Shaking. Swearing. Cursing him and thanking him like this feeling could only demand from her.

He chuckles and keeps playing in everything pooling for him from her body. A little smug.

“Just kissing?”

She nods mutely, craning her neck to reach for one from his smirking mouth.

“So wet,” she confirms without shame, and he traces a little circle on her thigh with her own cum. Clearly making a point. 

He lays back with her when her wiley, fidgety body relaxes. Both of them calm on the bed like he didn’t just make her curse up a storm, ready to end him, until he gave her what she wanted.

“What do you want to do today?”

_ Could anyone want more? _

She half-opens her eyes.

“Don’t you have a tennis lesson to teach?”

“Supposed to rain,” he says absently as his arms gather her to his chest. “Cancelled it.”

“Did you confirm this with  _ your student?” _

“Don’t need to. She worships me,” the sound of his laugh is like the cracking of a dry branch. “Can I take you to the movies?”

“Mhmm,” she nods against his chest. That would be nice. If she ever manages to get out of bed.

He hops up and she feels cold. The entire surface of her skin protests in nervous tingles with him far away.

This was going to be weird. If being together made being apart feel twice as bad. At least it would take some getting used to.

She never would have agreed to this if he was going to climb out of bed within the next hour. He pulls on his jeans and wanders over his low dresser. 

He holds up his car keys.

“You want to drive?”

He never drove to her lessons: he jogged to the court, it wasn’t worth the circus parking at the end of the Palpatine Estate’s driveway. He seemed to want to slip in and out of the proper undetected, which she preferred, and always preferred sparing people from interactions with her grandfather. About every two weeks or so he walked up to the house after a lesson to collect his fee. They always walked in silence, and Rey breathlessly ran upstairs to shower so she didn’t have to witness the mortification her grandfather likely subject both of them to, even separately. Then he would take off running back home: not needing to worry about navigating out of there by any means but a sprint.

That did not mean that his Porsche wasn’t something she coveted as part of the fantasy. 

The keys glitter in his fingers. Her eyes chase them as he swings them back and forth teasingly: catlike and intrigued. 

“No one ever lets me drive,” she hums with interest.

Ben looks approvingly down at her.

“You have to start sometime.”

Rey pulls her tee-shirt down to cover her belly as she stands up.

“I’m gonna want popcorn.”

“Then you’ll have it,” and he leans down to kiss her when she comes close to take the keys from his hand.

* * *

He was right: it’s raining by the time they are unlocking the Porsche. It’s so much prettier on the inside, or maybe contained so much power. She can’t stop smiling, that is, until he slides in the driver’s seat.

“We’ll take some back roads.”

_ “Oh.” _

He glances up at her, his door still wide open, and cranks his seat back as far as it’ll go. He must have to: he has long legs. There’s a smirk on his face as she moves around the front of the car to the passenger side. He must have meant he’d drive to a place with no traffic and she’d drive a few loops.

“Where are you going?”

“I-uh…” she raises her eyebrows at him. They stare at each other through the windshield.

Ben motions to his lap.

She almost chokes, face turning red.

“We’ll get pulled over.”

“That’s why we’re taking back roads.”

She takes a deep breath and summons her courage. And in a breeze of motion that carries her on impulse, she finds herself folded in his lap, grasping the steering wheel, craning her head back to look at him. He chuckles as he reaches for the door and closes them in, not unlike a clown car of bent, jumbled bodies, and guides her hands gently where he wants them.

His hands are large and patient, and his chest rumbles with laughter as she twists the keys in the ignition with a few false starts

“You’ve got it,” he guides. “Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” she looks over her shoulder at him, “you’re a good teacher.”

There’s a warmth that radiates from his strong chest as she pulls out of the driveway and feels freer than she ever felt possible.

There’s not a lot of talk about movies after that. There’s a lot of low murmuring in her ear about driving, about the hellion he knew she’d be behind the wheel, about the pleasure of their speed and that no one would find them out on this road. He brackets her with his long legs and with his chest to her back he feels like part of the car around her, something she’s driving, heavy machinery that he trusts her to power.

She loves it. He has to gently guide her by the knee to prevent her from flooring it into oblivion. This car could take off like a rocket: she knows it. Taking off with him in the car with her, even on roads, is the biggest temptation she’s ever faced. 

Until it starts raining, and he grows serious about the speed, so they pull over on a backroad by a corn field. The sky opens up in a summer storm and infects the air with listlessness. What can be done other than watch it rain?

The cornstalks tap like a snare drum when the drops get heavier. It’s a nice rattle, an alive one, and her hot skin takes a release of atmospheric pressure where she breathes easily.

They sit in silence for a moment. She turns off the Porsche, drops the keys in the cupholder so there are no accidents, and leans back against him. 

He cradles her to his chest. His hips shift in the seat, rocking her intentionally or unintentionally, she’s not sure, but that certainly relaxes them so they feel more like they’re lying down than driving.

“What do you want to do?” he asks against her nape.

_ Everything. _

“Whatever you want,” she whispers. The vision of the field in front of them warps as the rain falls heavier against the windshield.

He doesn’t give his answer in words. They just start doing what he wants to do. Hands wander her belly absently, one sneaks up her shirt and pinches her nipple, another trailing down her thigh. 

He dwarfs her with those hands. She shivers and feels examined, his head notched over her shoulder to watch her twitch and shiver over every touch. Her strong thighs shake like it’s her first lesson with her strict instructor. The window beside her cheek has begun to steam with her shallow breath.

A summer’s worth of her body being made for this. She wasn’t sure how much of herself she’d have given him if she was still soft and girlish, and couldn’t keep up with him on the court, couldn’t run as fast and as far as he commanded.

She had a lot of words for how she felt about Ben: most of them having something to do with flirting or a crush, but this is _ lust.  _

She wanted him and when that sharpened to a focused point it became so clear it was impossible to be afraid now.

At the fireworks he was purely focused on making her cum. Last night in his bed he was paying more attention to kissing her even as his hands wandered. Right now he’s fully attentive to touching her. 

Now he spreads her thighs over his lap and pets her. Rey shivers and tries to close her legs, but he’s hooked her, used her own body to hook her, with her legs trapped by his knees. It is a spot more powerful than the driver’s seat, and she mewls softly when his hand dips deftly inside her terry-cloth shorts. 

“This time you’re wet without kissing,” he muses, thumb rolling through slick flesh. Sifting through sand. 

She has to bite and claw to keep from keening out loud, until he urges her to not stop and so does it all anyway. Bite. Scratch. Moan.

It’s raining lightly on the windows by the time she cums. She can listen to the steady but arrhythmic patter on the glass. Her legs dangle over his, her feet not reaching the carpeted mats of the Falcon as the twitch with aftershocks. 

“Good?”

She leans forward and plucks up the keys just to fiddle with all this edgy energy.

“Good,” she confirms, absently toying with the keys in her hands. So heavy, the metal cool against her skin, the weight soothing as it drew her limp arms down.

He peppers her flushed cheek with sleepy kisses. 

Something swells _hard_ against her backside, something they'd both elected to ignore until now, but he is holding her more rigidly than before. She attempts to press back into him, exploring, but his arms lock her in place with a guttural groan.

“Are you going to drive us to the movies?”

_ Not yet _ his tone says. Rey tries not to deflate.

_ Then when? _

“Yes,” she says softly, slotting the keys into the ignition and feeling a flare of pride when he spread his legs wide enough to bracket hers again. 

Other than her slight disappointment. This was easy. This wasn’t a grand scheme involving multiple complicit liars to hide their activities. The world was right where they left it when it was over. They could just…

They can just let this happen to them, and feel it, and go to the movie afterwards because they could want to do both. 

She settles into the seat and arranges herself to drive this beast wherever she chooses.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentine's Day! This is going to be f i l t h y


End file.
